There was a sudden splash of dazzling colour in St Anne’s Square in Manchester. Under the stubborn grey shroud of the Pennine Cloud Blanket was a buzzing Moroccan market. As I wandered through the lamps and rugs, I tried to recall my haggling skills which I learnt in the Canary islands, and practised in Dubai. I soon found out that my negotiation drive had disengaged long ago, returning to the default setting which is Polite English. ‘What’s your best price,’ is a great start but you have to follow it up with some quick thinking if you want to nail a bargain and I failed spectacularly. Twice. And all this while sneaking these pictures. The market is in St. Anne’s Square until Saturday evening (May 5th.)

It’s funny how I don’t carry my digital camera any more, now that I can Instagram my flat grey iPhone pictures to look like I spent hours developing them in a studio in Hoxton. Click on any image to enlarge them.

They say that Catholics were chased into the tunnels beneath Manchester and murdered, hundreds of years ago. Last Halloween, we went on a tour of the tunnels under the city centre, which turned into a kind of grown up ghost train…

We experienced total darkness when we all turned our torches off, because there is no light down there. At this point, in a vast cave with a vaulted ceiling, we were encouraged to engage in a round of primal screaming. The effect was chilling, followed by a lot of nervous laughter. When the torches came back on there were real screams: someone had stumbled over a human skeleton, and further along in an air raid tunnel, what appeared to be a half-rotten corpse was slumped against a wall. In the darkness and confusion, it took a few moments to work out that these were dummies, courtesy of someone’s twisted sense of fun. We kept telling ourselves that as we shone our trembling torches over walls adorned with ancient head-counts from the second world war and strict Victorian posters.

Families sheltered here, shielding their children from German bombs. In Victorian times, immigrant workers were forced to live in the dark, dripping caverns. On the walls you can see ancient graffiti, the cave paintings of recent history. Fascinating, frightening and fun at the same time. Give the tour a go: if you’re curious about the strata of a city built in layers on top of itself, or if you crave sensory deprivation and a change of trousers.